Alan Cheuse

Book Review: 'A Nearly Perfect Copy'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:21:00 +0000

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Allison Amend is out with her third book. It's a novel called "A Nearly Perfect Copy." It features richly detailed characters, including an art dealer gone bad, and it's set in both Paris and New York. Our review Alan Cheuse found it all quite delectable.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Elmira, known as Elm Howells, works her expertise mainly about European drawings and paintings at a family art auction house in Manhattan.

Book Review: 'Submergence'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:38:00 +0000

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The writer J.M. Ledgard leads multiple lives. He's a journalist and covers East Africa for the Economist, but Ledgard is also a novelist.

Book Review: 'Where Tigers Are At Home'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:26:00 +0000

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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.

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And I'm Audie Cornish. Our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has just traveled to Brazil and back in an 800-page novel. The book is called "Where Tigers Are At Home." It's by a French novelist named Jean-Marie Blas de Robles and it's just out in English. Here's Alan's review.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: A Frenchman named Von Wogau, a divorced and retired journalist, lives in a small town in the northeastern region of Brazil.

Under Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:20:00 +0000

It used to be a truism among critics of British poetry that Keats and most of his fellow Romantic poets worked in the shadow of John Milton. I'm not making a perfect analogy when I suggest that most contemporary Japanese writers seem to be working under the shadow of Haruki Murakami, but I hope it highlights the spirit of the situation.

You certainly get that feeling of being haunted by Murakami when you begin reading the "Eleven Dark Tales," as she calls them, in this story cycle by Yoko Ogawa. The situations seem made for Murakami's particular blend of the real and the fantastic.

A Wintry Mix: Alan Cheuse Selects The Season's Best

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 19:48:00 +0000

It's that time of year again — the leaves have fallen, the dark comes early, the air brings with it a certain chill — and I've been piling up books on my reading table, books I've culled from the offerings of the past few months, which because of their essential lyric beauty and power stand as special gifts for you and yours.

They sometimes seem at odds, the lyrical impulse and the narrative impulse.

A Midcentury Romance, With 'Sunlight' And 'Shadow'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:28:00 +0000

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin's new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It's got great polarized motifs — war and peace, heroism and cowardice, crime and civility, pleasure and business, love and hate, bias and acceptance — which the gifted novelist weaves into a grand, old-fashioned romance, a New York love story that begins with a Hollywoodish meet-cute on the Staten Island Ferry.

"To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love," Helprin writes.

Book Review: 'The People Of Forever Are Not Afraid'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 21:30:00 +0000

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Now, an insider's view of the Israeli Defense Force. In the new novel, "The People Of Forever Are Not Afraid," author and veteran Shani Boianjiu tells the story of three young women serving in the IDF. Alan Cheuse has our review.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: There's an appealing quality to the comradeship of these three new Israeli Defense Force recruits. Yael, Avishag and Lea, girls from an outlying Israeli village. They're just so desperately bored and lecherous they can hardly live with themselves.

Book Review: 'Black Dahlia and White Rose'

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Alan Cheuse reviews Joyce Carol Oates most recent story collection, Black Dahlia and White Rose. Cheuse teaches creative writing at George Mason University.

Book Review: 'God Carlos'

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:36:00 +0000

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

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And I'm Melissa Block. Now to the 16th Century and the Spanish port of Cadiz. It's the setting for "God Carlos," a new novel by Jamaican-born writer Anthony Winkler, who takes us on a voyage to the New World.

Alan Cheuse Reviews 'The Colonel'

Alan Cheuse — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:11:00 +0000

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's new novel, The Colonel, tells the story of an Iranian military figure whose personal life demonstrates the strains in the social and political order of his native land.